The House Of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

This is like a Russian doll, a story within a story within a truth, and all woven together and very well told. I found this because it was long-listed for the Booker Prize (and in my opinion, which is never asked for nor heeded, it is better than a number of those that made the short list) and is a wonderful story. Some events have been changed to suit the story, but the true part goes like this. Ethel Proudlock took her husband’s revolver and shot a man dead at her house in Malaysia in 1911. She claimed the victim, William Steward, had arrived unannounced and attempted to kiss her. But her trial pointed to a deeper story, one that lifted the lid on the culture that spawned it. She was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s expat community, a conservative outpost nicknamed Cheltenham-on-the-Equator. Her rumored infidelity, combined with her concealed mixed-race background, made her a pariah and in a surprising turn of events, she was found guilty. This widely known scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, who makes an appearance in this book as a house guest of Robert and Lesley Hamlyn in Penang--he is a world famous author at the time, but he is also on the downhill side of his career, with quite a few skeletons in his closet to keep hidden. The book is a meditation on how and why we tell stories, but it’s also a political saga of sorts, charting Lesley’s journey towards self-empowerment and embrace of social activism, a window into when and where and how colonialism loses its attraction as well as its glitter.

Fernandina Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

Fernandina is the westernmost island in the Galapagos Islands, the third largest and youngest of the islands, less than one million years old. It is the most volcanically active and sits at the center of the hot spot that created the Galapagos Islands. It first appeared on the navigational charts and crude map produced by the British buccaneer Ambrose Cowley in 1684. He named it Narborough Island in honor of Sir John Narborough, an English naval commander of the 17th century. Its Spanish name, Fernandina, was given to honor King Fernando of Spain, who sponsored the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The island is most famous for its continuing series of volcanic eruptions. Many of the early visitors to the archipelago commented on dramatic changes in the landscape, smoking craters, and actual eruptions. The most famous of these is the description of a violent eruption in 1825 by Benjamin Morrell, the captain of the New York-based schooner Tartar. Another important historical event was the discovery and collection in 1906 by Rollo Beck of the California Academy of Sciences Expedition of the only giant tortoise ever found on Fernandina.

There is a lot of shore life on this island, but the highlight is the massive groups of marine iguanas that can be found gathering on the black lava rock onshore or swimming and eating in the ocean nearby. The California Academy of Sciences houses the largest collection of specimens brought back from the Galapagos, most notably a finch collection so significant that it continues to help modern-day researchers answer scientific questions.

My Government Means To Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

This book took me a while to get into the rhythm of it, but as it went along I really fell in step with it and loved it. It is the only work of fiction that I have read that has extensive footnoting to edify the reader as to who some of the well known people that play a role in the story are, as well as what significance some of the places hold. This is the story of Trey Singleton, who is the one who tells it. He is a teenager who lives at the crossroads of the Civil Rights and Gay Rights eras. His parents are wealthy former Black Panthers whose politics have simmered into careers as a speechwriter and policy advisor (his mother) and a pharmaceutical lobbyist (his father). Overly concerned with the image their family projects, Trey’s parents are not fond of his apparent gayness and evident femininity; in addition, they hold a grudge against him for his involvement in his younger brother’s disappearance, something they all seem to regret, and on various levels played a role in, to their collective chagrin. Trey is ready to leave home at the age of seventeen and to make his way in New York City. Trey’s savings don’t last for long, and he suspects that his family is surveilling him from afar, but he does achieve independence, with all the precarity that entails. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s well on his way to becoming a scrappy activist in his parents’ former stead. His primary cause is HIV–AIDs activism, and he achieves prominence as a founding member of ACT UP. He is tender, intelligent, exposed to the early AIDS era at a young age, and he does not look away, he leans in. Some of the scenes in this novel are set in Mt. Morris, a defunct bathhouse that was once a haven for gay black men in Harlem. Trey experiences it as a shadowy set of corridors, replete with private and open sex rooms, locker rooms, and revealing bath towels. His descriptions of the site are immersive and dangerous. As a non-gay, non-black reader, I felt led by the hand through a world I would only know through fiction.

Nyad (2023)

This is at core a pretty standard story of an uplifting sporting feat, a familiar tale of triumph over adversity, in this case man versus ocean, ocean almost always winning--but not every single time. The story is told by married documentarians, who earned an Academy Award for their jaw-dropping 2018 film “Free Solo,” so while it is a docudrama, the story is told in a recognizable documentary format. Nyad was a legendary long-distance swimmer and former ABC “Wide World of Sports” correspondent and the movie tells the tale of her quest at age 64 to swim from Cuba to Florida, a brutal stretch of 110 miles. When Nyad finally crossed successfully, with the help of a crew of coaches, kayakers, and a medic, it was her fifth attempt. We witness all the setbacks, all the ways in which the journey went frustratingly wrong before it went right. An unexpected encounter with a swarm of box jellyfish provides a harrowing scene of nighttime horror, the weather is a constant battle, the current along the route is relentlessly not on the swimmer's side, as examples. Warning, Nyad is not a nice person--she is egotistical, narcissisticly self-centered and self-important, perhaps qualities one needs to accomplish this feat, but she is not great girlfriend material. Despite all that, this is a very enjoyable movie with great to watch, Annette Benning as Nyad and Jodie Foster as her coach and friend do a phenomenal job acting, and this is a rightful Oscar contender. Streaming on Netflix.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

According to a review that I read James McBride cites as his inspiration a camp outside Philadelphia where he worked every summer as a college student during the 1970s. At the time, it was called The Variety Club Camp for Handicapped Children. The remarkable camp director taught him lifetime lessons about inclusivity, love and acceptance--but he hasn't been able to write about it directly, so he gives us this, a novel about Pottstown, Pa., and a historically Black and immigrant Jewish neighborhood called "Chicken Hill." The Jews are moving on, looking to improve their lot in life, but not all of them, and this is a story that revolves around community, helping each other even if you don't look the same, and what that does for you and others around you. It is about this and so much more, but it is a beautifully told story and I don't want to give too much away, just read it.

Punta Vicente Roca on Isabela Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

Isabela Island is the largest of the Galápagos Islands, with an area of 4,586 km² and a length of 100 km. By itself, it is larger than all the other islands in the chain combined and it has a little under 2000 permanent inhabitants. The island straddles the equator; we crosed it twice as we circumnavigated it.

The Galapagos flightless cormorant is an endemic species to Galapagos, and is not only the heaviest cormorant species, but also the only one out of 29 species which cannot fly. They are therefore confined to the lava shoreline and beaches of Isabela and Fernandina Islands. These were so close to our panga that you could have touched them--in fact, one nipped the bum of one of our co-passengers!

BRown noddies in Galapagos are closely related to the tern family and are the largest of all noddies, easily distinguished by its cousin the Black noddy thanks to its larger size and feathers. It resembles a pigeon of sorts, with a greyish-white cap at the top of their heads that fades into the dark brown feathers that cover the rest of their body. Their white eye-ring is a distinctive feature in adults. The brown noddy is rarely seen near the land as a result of being pelagic, flying out for extended periods in the warm tropical waters, searching for small fish and/or squid, swooping low and using how-dipping and contact-dipping to catch its prey. They nest on these shoreline cliffs.

Mastering The Art Of French Eating by Ann Mah

I read a review that kind of summed up my feelings--there is nothing ground breaking here, but it is endearing and enjoyable--and best of all, it launched me further down the road towards planning my next trip to France. Like the author, I am thoroughly charmed by the whole country's priority on food, how to prepare it, when to eat it, how to eat it, and to be reverent of the process along the way. The book starts off with she and her husband getting a dream diplomatic posting in France, and then he gets deployed to Iraq for a year, so she essentially lives alone in Paris, mostly feeling sorry for herself at the outset, but then settling in on writing about the quintessential dish from various regions around France. The story of pistou, a traditional Provencal summer soup is hilariously accurate when it comes to how when in France you must do it the way it has always been done, no veering off on your own variation. She doesn't go to the Perigord, but we witnessed that adherence to tradition when it came to fois gras. The other is about crepes in Brittany, a region I have not been to, but am now very much looking forward to visiting. If you are a Francophile and especially if you like to both cook and eat, this will be an enjoyable read.

Miskay, Quito, Ecuador

My dad died recently, this is the first holiday without him and it really has me thinking. One thing is that I wish I had told him exactly what I am grateful about that he and my mom taught me, but I am going to be writing a lot about it, I fear. So here is where I start. My parents love food and love travel and my recent trip to Ecuador was walking in the footsteps of a trip they took when they were my age, and this was my first meal there, at a restaurant that serves native Quechuan food. He would have loved this ceviche, which we have vowed to try to replicate at home, at least the shrimp one (there is also octopus and a fish one pictured here), but we never got the chance.

I think he would also have enjoyed the traditional Ecuadorian side dish that is served with ceviche--popcorn, corn nuts, and plantain chips! So good. I traveled south of the American border with my parents on a number of occasions and came away with a love of the food and the urge to be able to speak to people. At the time I did not think of it as the language of conquerors, which it is, but the silver lining is that often it is a second language for both of us, which makes it easier for me to keep up.

Say It Loud by Randall Kennedy

This is a tough read. The author makes clear, over and over again, in the 29 essays collected here, by implication or sometimes by stating it, that he is not optimistic about race relations. He spends a lot of time here pointing out where people are wrong in their things, all the while carving out a middle road between left- and right-wing political positions that non-extremists could comfortably accept. He recognizes the persistent racial injustice in America and criticizes a conservative Supreme Court for crippling some of our social advancements. Yet he does not follow liberals in their calls to abolish the police, denounce all references and statues of past racists on campuses or penalize instructors who enunciate “nigger” for pedagogical purposes. He correctly notes that there is a “double sidedness of policing” — Black people in this country are paradoxically both over- and under-policed. He has a whole a chapter devoted to the topic of black pride —which he argues is problematic because one should not feel pride in something one inherits. Just as it is inappropriate for the rich to feel pride in their inherited wealth, so too is it inappropriate for anyone to feel pride in their inherited race. Personal achievement, he posits, is the correct token for pride. And personal achievement he has in excess--what isn't to be found is any ray of hope that there might be a way out of this, that we might find a path.

Santiago Island, Galapagos, Ecuador

Santiago, originally named James Island after England’s King James II, was the second of the Galápagos Islands visited by Charles Darwin. The Beagle arrived there on October 5, 1835. There they found a party of Spaniards who had come from Charles Island to dry fish and salt tortoise meat. About 6 mi inland they discovered two men living in a hovel, who were employed catching tortoises. Santiago had long been a source of water, wood, and tortoises for buccaneers and whalers, as well as Captain Porter of the USS Essex from 1812-1814.

Everyone has heard of Darwin's finches, but it was the mockingbird that convinced Darwin that evolution was at work in the molding of species on our planet. Darwin's plant collections were all clearly marked and documented, as Henslow had taught him. But Darwin did not always record the exact island where he found each Galápagos bird. "It never occurred to me, that the productions of islands only a few miles apart, and placed under the same physical conditions, would be dissimilar." Too late, he realized that many organisms were unique to each island-a fact confirmed by his mockingbird specimens. Darwin sorely regretted the lost opportunity to do a systematic study of each island, writing, "It is the fate of every voyager, when he has just discovered what object in any place is more particularly worthy of his attention, to be hurried from it."